It’s funny how it works
you never fit in
with the rednecks or the rockers
the nerds or the jocks or the drama kids
not even with kids who quote movies until they have
an incessant private language
but you work and work at it
to at least stop looking so out of place
to at least quiet the loudest laughter
to get left, finally, and at long last, the fuck alone
Until
one day you are (alone), and the only place left
that you’re out of place
and on the outside
and being judged
is inside your own head
and, suddenly, David Byrne
is smarter than anyone you’ve ever met
my god, what have I done, indeed
letting the days go by
7.18.2008
And Your Voice is Everything (part 3)
Read part one
Read part two
I rode my bike home in a thought-induced haze, nearly veering into a moving car at one point to avoid one parked in the bike lane. Now that I was done waiting, that my chance meeting had taken place, no matter how briefly and unsatisfyingly, it seemed like it was up to me to make the next step happen; I just didn't have any idea what the next step should be or how to make it happen.
It wasn't going to happen if it had to happen at my house, that was for sure. I was living with two friends that I had met in school; they were both still enrolled, although Josh was thinking about switching majors again, I think. The point is, we were none of us neat freaks, and collectively we had brought our rental house to the state where no matter where you were about to sit - the couch, the floor, the kitchen table - you always took an extra second to survey the area before you sat down, just in case. In case of what was not always clear, but just in case.
Not that she would have known where I lived anyway, since I had somehow managed, during what might well have been my only opportunity to talk to her, to avoid telling her my name, to avoid asking for her number, to completely fail to execute any tactic at all that would have resulted in either me having learned more about her or her having learned anything at all about me. You have to remember, this was before every band had a website and all that stuff, so I couldn't just look her up online and "friend" her and generally become one of a sea of faceless semi-stalkers.
Read part two
I rode my bike home in a thought-induced haze, nearly veering into a moving car at one point to avoid one parked in the bike lane. Now that I was done waiting, that my chance meeting had taken place, no matter how briefly and unsatisfyingly, it seemed like it was up to me to make the next step happen; I just didn't have any idea what the next step should be or how to make it happen.
It wasn't going to happen if it had to happen at my house, that was for sure. I was living with two friends that I had met in school; they were both still enrolled, although Josh was thinking about switching majors again, I think. The point is, we were none of us neat freaks, and collectively we had brought our rental house to the state where no matter where you were about to sit - the couch, the floor, the kitchen table - you always took an extra second to survey the area before you sat down, just in case. In case of what was not always clear, but just in case.
Not that she would have known where I lived anyway, since I had somehow managed, during what might well have been my only opportunity to talk to her, to avoid telling her my name, to avoid asking for her number, to completely fail to execute any tactic at all that would have resulted in either me having learned more about her or her having learned anything at all about me. You have to remember, this was before every band had a website and all that stuff, so I couldn't just look her up online and "friend" her and generally become one of a sea of faceless semi-stalkers.
7.16.2008
mid-July short story
"Billy, you can't go out like that...put on your hat and gloves at least, if you won't wear your scarf."
He was dreaming again, but his mother was calling him the wrong name in the dream. She had always called him Charles, and he had never owned a scarf that he could remember. But he brought it over dutifully to her, in the dream, and she wound it around his neck three times clumsily, brushing his face with the ends as it went past. He lay in bed, face twitching, nearly breaking the surface of sleep.
He went to the front door (it was now the front door of a house from much later, his aunt and uncle's house in Illinois) and opened it to reveal the snow that he had been waiting for, snow he had heard falling by the surreal muffled silence it brought with it. Flakes the size of silver dollars spiraled down in waves of pure white, powdering the ground and drifting up on the car, the porch, the shoulders of his jacket.
He involuntarily wrapped the comforter a little tighter, back in bed, maybe to shield his neck from a draft from the air conditioning vent. He had never been able to bring himself to get a cat, after his wife had died; she had been crazy about the things, but hadn't kept one since they lost two in quick succession to neighborhood cars. The only thing they'd ever been good for was as footwarmers, as far as he was concerned.
He felt the warmth ebbing from his toes as even the dry powder he was trudging through began to stick to his galoshes. It was just a little further down the road, though, to his dad's house, and then there would be all of his cousins, and his brothers, and dad would probably have hung stockings for all of them and stuffed them with all kinds of candy. He could almost taste butterscotch, in the dream.
When he got to the gate, though, it was the gate of his father's first house, from before the divorce, and as he made his way through he could hear his mother's voice from inside alongside all the others. He had not been old enough to remember that house, the house where he was born, but had studied the smiling family posed outside the front gate enough times to see it more clearly than he saw his own house when he was awake. He made a half turn, toward his left shoulder, pressing his face more deeply into the pillow as half-nonsense language started coming through from his dreaming.
"Mom! Dad! Hey everyone!" he called out as he pushed the front door open, the tapestry of voices seeming to recede as he listened into the kitchen. He took a step into the hallway and realized he hadn't taken off his overshoes yet; he couldn't go into the house with them caked in mud, as they suddenly seemed to be. His fingers fumbled with the thick gloves as he tried to tear them off, his scarf crept up into his line of sight each time he bent down to the galoshes. He realized the snow was falling again, suddenly, by the totality of the silence, the muffled dead quiet of the empty house.
He only shifted slightly in his bed, as the dream ended, drifting quietly down into another, deeper stage of sleep; mercifully, perhaps, still hours from waking, and perhaps not to remember the dream again, tonight. He would remember to throw a bag of butterscotch candies into his shopping cart tomorrow, though; he would remember that.
He was dreaming again, but his mother was calling him the wrong name in the dream. She had always called him Charles, and he had never owned a scarf that he could remember. But he brought it over dutifully to her, in the dream, and she wound it around his neck three times clumsily, brushing his face with the ends as it went past. He lay in bed, face twitching, nearly breaking the surface of sleep.
He went to the front door (it was now the front door of a house from much later, his aunt and uncle's house in Illinois) and opened it to reveal the snow that he had been waiting for, snow he had heard falling by the surreal muffled silence it brought with it. Flakes the size of silver dollars spiraled down in waves of pure white, powdering the ground and drifting up on the car, the porch, the shoulders of his jacket.
He involuntarily wrapped the comforter a little tighter, back in bed, maybe to shield his neck from a draft from the air conditioning vent. He had never been able to bring himself to get a cat, after his wife had died; she had been crazy about the things, but hadn't kept one since they lost two in quick succession to neighborhood cars. The only thing they'd ever been good for was as footwarmers, as far as he was concerned.
He felt the warmth ebbing from his toes as even the dry powder he was trudging through began to stick to his galoshes. It was just a little further down the road, though, to his dad's house, and then there would be all of his cousins, and his brothers, and dad would probably have hung stockings for all of them and stuffed them with all kinds of candy. He could almost taste butterscotch, in the dream.
When he got to the gate, though, it was the gate of his father's first house, from before the divorce, and as he made his way through he could hear his mother's voice from inside alongside all the others. He had not been old enough to remember that house, the house where he was born, but had studied the smiling family posed outside the front gate enough times to see it more clearly than he saw his own house when he was awake. He made a half turn, toward his left shoulder, pressing his face more deeply into the pillow as half-nonsense language started coming through from his dreaming.
"Mom! Dad! Hey everyone!" he called out as he pushed the front door open, the tapestry of voices seeming to recede as he listened into the kitchen. He took a step into the hallway and realized he hadn't taken off his overshoes yet; he couldn't go into the house with them caked in mud, as they suddenly seemed to be. His fingers fumbled with the thick gloves as he tried to tear them off, his scarf crept up into his line of sight each time he bent down to the galoshes. He realized the snow was falling again, suddenly, by the totality of the silence, the muffled dead quiet of the empty house.
He only shifted slightly in his bed, as the dream ended, drifting quietly down into another, deeper stage of sleep; mercifully, perhaps, still hours from waking, and perhaps not to remember the dream again, tonight. He would remember to throw a bag of butterscotch candies into his shopping cart tomorrow, though; he would remember that.
7.10.2008
How to tell when you're the weird neighbor
"...if it wasn't for the crumbs, I mean, it would be totally better, it's just I have this thing about crumbs, and plus who can eat a whole loaf of bread in like, three days before it gets all stale?"
I had heard this whole line of reasoning, oh, I don't know, SEVENTY OR EIGHTY TIMES before, but I nodded and gave my standard line about the health benefits of using whole wheat and spelt and the total absence of the weird shit they put in there as preservatives these days, blah blah blah. I don't know why I'm so stuck on getting my neighbors warmed up to the bread I bake for them, it just strikes me as kind of odd that they both are left completely cold by the thought of getting something for free, when people will usually risk their lives, or those of their kids and pets at least, just for a chance at a t-shirt being thrown into the crowd at a ballgame or a free doughnut at a Holiday Inn continental breakfast that fifteen people have probably had their hands on already that morning.
Chuck appeared behind her at the door, glancing over her shoulder at me with my paper towel-swaddled potential present. "Hey, Steve, more bread? Is it quadrotriticale this time?" He snorted at that, like he always does, and headed back up their entry hallway. She finally took it out of my hands with a quick smile and a mostly sincere "thank you", but as she turned and swung the door shut I clearly heard, "What the fuck is with..." from the other room before the latch clicked and I turned to walk back home.
Fine. Let 'em go back to their Wonder Bread and mayonnaise sandwiches, to bread that you can leave in the pantry next to the Twinkies and never have to check the expiration date on either of them. Maybe when Chuck's blood pressure gets to that point where his doctor is "a little concerned", he'll come running over for a few pointers on wheat bran and steel-cut oats. But I doubt it.
P.S. Fuck hiatuses.
I had heard this whole line of reasoning, oh, I don't know, SEVENTY OR EIGHTY TIMES before, but I nodded and gave my standard line about the health benefits of using whole wheat and spelt and the total absence of the weird shit they put in there as preservatives these days, blah blah blah. I don't know why I'm so stuck on getting my neighbors warmed up to the bread I bake for them, it just strikes me as kind of odd that they both are left completely cold by the thought of getting something for free, when people will usually risk their lives, or those of their kids and pets at least, just for a chance at a t-shirt being thrown into the crowd at a ballgame or a free doughnut at a Holiday Inn continental breakfast that fifteen people have probably had their hands on already that morning.
Chuck appeared behind her at the door, glancing over her shoulder at me with my paper towel-swaddled potential present. "Hey, Steve, more bread? Is it quadrotriticale this time?" He snorted at that, like he always does, and headed back up their entry hallway. She finally took it out of my hands with a quick smile and a mostly sincere "thank you", but as she turned and swung the door shut I clearly heard, "What the fuck is with..." from the other room before the latch clicked and I turned to walk back home.
Fine. Let 'em go back to their Wonder Bread and mayonnaise sandwiches, to bread that you can leave in the pantry next to the Twinkies and never have to check the expiration date on either of them. Maybe when Chuck's blood pressure gets to that point where his doctor is "a little concerned", he'll come running over for a few pointers on wheat bran and steel-cut oats. But I doubt it.
P.S. Fuck hiatuses.
7.07.2008
Hiatus
I think I'm going to take a little time off, at least from trying to post creative writing type stuff...everything seems like it comes out like I'm either depressed, or psychotic, or both, lately.
So, Stace, feel free to clear out some of your backlog of material that's just waiting for that final polish to be applied to it, and I'll try to chime in with some "real life" stuff now and then...let's see...
1. Work sucks
2. We have a couple of cute foster-foster puppies (we're just keeping them for a quarantine period for other foster parents because it's easier for us)
3. Work sucks
I think that about covers it! Let the hiatus begin!
So, Stace, feel free to clear out some of your backlog of material that's just waiting for that final polish to be applied to it, and I'll try to chime in with some "real life" stuff now and then...let's see...
1. Work sucks
2. We have a couple of cute foster-foster puppies (we're just keeping them for a quarantine period for other foster parents because it's easier for us)
3. Work sucks
I think that about covers it! Let the hiatus begin!
7.05.2008
It's "grande", sir...
"Ummmmm...I guess give me a large latte with an extra shot, and can I get one pump of hazelnut and a half pump of vanilla? And with half two percent and half skim?"
I didn't really like coffee, even, but what I did like was going somewhere and ordering something like that, just to see what kind of reaction it would get. You could always tell the real pro's; they didn't bat an eye, maybe they'd give you a "sure thing, sir!" or make a quick scrawl on the cup, but they never lost that air that they had just made seventeen of those in a row just before you walked in, no big deal.
The guy today was somewhere in the middle; I think he briefly entertained the idea of telling me they wouldn't mix milks like that, but he controlled it well and only let a little bit of frustration seep into his voice as he called it out to the girl making drinks. I could definitely tell that he noticed me not tipping; he didn't glare at me but he didn't have that generic friendly smile anymore either.
So I waited for a minute for the drink, and I saw this girl go by on a moped that I had asked out a couple of times just after college. She still didn't wear a helmet, which didn't really surprise me, but I couldn't tell if the half-turn of the head that she made as she went past the store window meant that she had seen me as well, or if it was just a coincidence. I looked a lot different then, with the hair and the flannel shirts and the hemp jewelry, but she looked mostly the same, blond hair gathered back in barrettes with loose ends whipping just over the place on the back of her neck that I'd never quite gotten up the nerve to rest my fingers on for a moment sometime, casually, even when we were both on the couch at a friend's party or sitting around a campfire at the beach at the end of the summer, collectively and unconsciously resisting the deepening chill and the specter of growing older with one of the oldest and most primal human technologies of all.
Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe she would have taken me up on a couple of dinners then, maybe we could have grown old together and vacationed in Maine in the summer and all those things; I guess it's possible. To me, though, the moped told the story better; she was going somewhere, and I may or may not have been part of the scenery on the way by, a bit of color and texture that helped make up the impressionistic memory of a short trip to somewhere very ordinary that would almost certainly be filtered from her mind as soon as she got there, only to turn up again in a dream, perhaps, or a vague impression of having encountered something familiar.
I wish I could say that I swung back by the tip jar on the way out and dropped a couple of bucks in, but instead I made a big fuss about the milk being scorched (it wasn't) and demanded my money back, which tied up things at the counter for a good three or four minutes. I could feel the eyes rolling and the impatient glances at watches and cell phones behind me, and it didn't feel good exactly, but inside I was saying, "yeah, ignore this, you fuckers, block this out of your morning memories...you'll get to work a little late or a little frazzled and you'll be telling somebody a couple of cubes over the story of the guy in the coffee shop this morning, and I'll be that fucking guy, and even though it won't matter to you, I'll get to tell the same story, and it'll matter to me, it will fucking well matter to me."
I also wish I could say that I don't look for girls on mopeds anymore either, but I do. God help me, I still do.
I didn't really like coffee, even, but what I did like was going somewhere and ordering something like that, just to see what kind of reaction it would get. You could always tell the real pro's; they didn't bat an eye, maybe they'd give you a "sure thing, sir!" or make a quick scrawl on the cup, but they never lost that air that they had just made seventeen of those in a row just before you walked in, no big deal.
The guy today was somewhere in the middle; I think he briefly entertained the idea of telling me they wouldn't mix milks like that, but he controlled it well and only let a little bit of frustration seep into his voice as he called it out to the girl making drinks. I could definitely tell that he noticed me not tipping; he didn't glare at me but he didn't have that generic friendly smile anymore either.
So I waited for a minute for the drink, and I saw this girl go by on a moped that I had asked out a couple of times just after college. She still didn't wear a helmet, which didn't really surprise me, but I couldn't tell if the half-turn of the head that she made as she went past the store window meant that she had seen me as well, or if it was just a coincidence. I looked a lot different then, with the hair and the flannel shirts and the hemp jewelry, but she looked mostly the same, blond hair gathered back in barrettes with loose ends whipping just over the place on the back of her neck that I'd never quite gotten up the nerve to rest my fingers on for a moment sometime, casually, even when we were both on the couch at a friend's party or sitting around a campfire at the beach at the end of the summer, collectively and unconsciously resisting the deepening chill and the specter of growing older with one of the oldest and most primal human technologies of all.
Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe she would have taken me up on a couple of dinners then, maybe we could have grown old together and vacationed in Maine in the summer and all those things; I guess it's possible. To me, though, the moped told the story better; she was going somewhere, and I may or may not have been part of the scenery on the way by, a bit of color and texture that helped make up the impressionistic memory of a short trip to somewhere very ordinary that would almost certainly be filtered from her mind as soon as she got there, only to turn up again in a dream, perhaps, or a vague impression of having encountered something familiar.
I wish I could say that I swung back by the tip jar on the way out and dropped a couple of bucks in, but instead I made a big fuss about the milk being scorched (it wasn't) and demanded my money back, which tied up things at the counter for a good three or four minutes. I could feel the eyes rolling and the impatient glances at watches and cell phones behind me, and it didn't feel good exactly, but inside I was saying, "yeah, ignore this, you fuckers, block this out of your morning memories...you'll get to work a little late or a little frazzled and you'll be telling somebody a couple of cubes over the story of the guy in the coffee shop this morning, and I'll be that fucking guy, and even though it won't matter to you, I'll get to tell the same story, and it'll matter to me, it will fucking well matter to me."
I also wish I could say that I don't look for girls on mopeds anymore either, but I do. God help me, I still do.
7.03.2008
Haiku, just for you
Summer Texas sun
saps the strength of better men
(and women) than me
Inspiration drought
leads to longish silences
on an empty blog
One would meekly crave
indulgence of his readers
plural implies hope
Is there more to tell
on "Your Voice is Everything"?
Talk amongst yourselves
saps the strength of better men
(and women) than me
Inspiration drought
leads to longish silences
on an empty blog
One would meekly crave
indulgence of his readers
plural implies hope
Is there more to tell
on "Your Voice is Everything"?
Talk amongst yourselves
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